This times a thousand. Using Tunnel Bear to stream from the CBC website from Florida. I love being able to see the whole event. Not just what NBC has decided I would like. It sucks that NBC will never learn and they have exclusive broadcast rights till at least 2020.

They count public posts. Now that G+ has communities and they are all by default public postings, I can see G+ jumping up the rankings. All the previous studies that talked about how G+ was struggling also looked at public postings only. I've been using G+ since it was still invite only. I and the hundreds of folks in my circles were not posting publicly so as far as anyone could tell my account was unused. Now I have a lot of public posts as I'm very active in my communities.

Twitter and Facebook are public postings by default so it has been easier for these third parties to try to determine how active the user base is at those sites.

Both of which were exposed as false by other scientists who could not verify the results. Science is self correcting. Too many folks think that once something is published that it becomes some sort of scientific law that is never challenged or repeated. When other scientist are unable to repeat the results, and/or when new evidence comes to light that contradicts the original research then a debate starts. If the original research was falsified (i.e. a hoax) then it gets found out, retractions are made, and science continues on.

In the case of Piltdown man there were not many human fossils found the time, but even at it's announcement some were skeptical as it didn't have the expected features. As more human and pre-human fossils were found it was easy to see that Piltdown man did not fit with all the other evidence. Confronted with this the original researcher finally admitted that he faked his research.

For the autism/vaccine link, no one else could repeat his findings that vaccines that contained mercury caused an increase rate of autism. You can read here (http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5258.full) about how he was going to use his "research" as a scare tactic to convince parents that they needed to use his companies diagnostic services to make sure that vaccines didn't hurt their child.

Tl;DR Science is self-correcting. When was the last time you saw a politician change his stance based on new evidence.

What was that old quote? "I'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard."

That quote is from William Frank Buckley, Jr. (November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008)

According to Wikipedia he was a conservative American author and commentator. He founded the political magazine National Review in 1955, which had a major impact in stimulating the conservative movement.

He didn't say that because scientist are objectively bad at governance. It was because academia is full of "liberals" and he didn't like liberals. I'm sure Rush Limbaugh would give a similar response if asked. Just like Al Franken or Rachael Maddow wouldn't want the government run by the faculty of Bob Jones University.

What email? I didn't know I had an option to vote till reading this today. Did I need to "Friend" Zuckerburg to get these notices? Maybe no one voted cause no one knew it was an option.
“But the plans were on display ”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The business split was due to the licensing agreements. I forget which studio was mentioned in the article I read at the time of the split but the scenario went like this.
Studio license costs $500,000/yr if you have less than say 100,000 subscribers. If you go over that subscriber limit the Studio ups the fee to $5million/yr. With Netflix as one company the studios were lumping DVD only customers with the Streaming customers to inflate the subscriber limit. If the streaming side became its own business then the license fee is based only on streaming customers. At the time the DVD only customers were something like 2/3+ of the customers. If the split had been successful it would have severely reduced the license fees that Netflix was paying.
If Reed had come out and explained this to the customers the split might have worked. But he didn't. So Netflix came out looking like they were simply trying to double your monthly bill.

suraj.sun writes: Sen. Richard Blumenthal(http://blumenthal.senate.gov/contact) has a status update for employers who ask job seekers for access to their private Facebook accounts: He’s writing a bill to outlaw the practice. The Connecticut Democrat and former state attorney general told POLITICO(http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74325.html) that those kind of requests from prospective employers amount to an "unreasonable invasion of privacy" for those looking for work. Blumenthal said it ought to be prohibited, just like other banned employment practices such as administering polygraph tests to screen applicants.

The senator's concern stems from a series of reports, first by The Associated Press, about employers asking job applicants and current workers for log-in credentials to their email accounts and social networking sites. The goal has been to check up on their online behavior.

McGruber writes: Bloomberg News is reporting (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-22/at-t-accused-of-improperly-billing-u-s-program-for-deaf-1-.html) that AT&T got more than $16 million from the US government to run Telecommunications Relay Services, intended to help the hearing- and speech-impaired. However, as "many as 95 percent of the calls in AT&T’s hearing- impaired program were made by people outside the U.S. attempting to defraud merchants through the use of stolen credit cards, counterfeit checks and money orders".

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ), "AT&T in 2004, after getting complaints from merchants, determined the Internet Protocol addresses of 10 of the top 12 users of the service were abroad, primarily in Lagos, Nigeria"

The DOJ intervened in the whistle-blower lawsuit Lyttle v. AT&T Communications of Pennsylvania, 10-01376, U.S. District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh). The DOJ is seeking triple damages from AT&T

An anonymous reader writes: We speak to independent video game shop owner Nick Elliot about the downfall of Game, digital downloads and the future of gaming. He tells IBTimes UK:"We have found a steady rise in business since the initial wobbles in GameGroup.""We don't see the change to digital downloads being an instant overnight shift.""You can't line the bookshelves in your living room with digital downloaded films and games."

actually you can hide your networks / circles. Go under your profile, click edit, click on your circles (left side bar)
You will see the options to show or not show your circles. You can show all circles or specific ones. You can limit circle viewing to public or only those already in your circles.
You can even stop people from seeing who has placed you in a circle.
The only mandatory public information is your Name, Gender, and a profile pic.